George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 21  George & The Odd Men   

Eiffel Tower July 1888 George
did not approve of this erection.  

George went to Paris and Italy with Plitt. Just 'Plitt' - actually Ernst Konrad Plitt, a German chum of sorts.

On the day before this, October 10th 1888, George records his disgust at his companion wanting to eat at a working man's eating-house full of working classes. It is as good an example of the Gissing joke as we ever going to get:
'Plitt, much astonished that I object to dine in a dirty little eating house, solely frequented by working-people, cries out against my prejudices, 'I don't understand how you ever got any knowledge of workpeople!'  Suppose I had answered: 'I am studying the type at this moment'?

The same day, George records an incident whereby he recommends Gaboriau's 'Petit Vieux des Batignolles' to Plitt, who dismisses it as mere pulp fiction. This is a detective story written in 1876, told from the standpoint of a doctor who assisted a brilliant freelance detective - ten years before Watson assisted Holmes in 'A Study in Scarlet' (Sherlock Holmes' first outing, written in '86, published in 1887); George had noted an account of the 'Jack the Ripper' case in the Petit Journal on October 2nd, so murder was on his mind - Plitt being the reason, no doubt! George admired Petit Vieux' twists and turns - it is a great little read, well worth a look.

Plitt annoys George almost hourly. Plitt says he deplores English as a poor language for pathos - good for science and business and comic plays and not much else, he reckons. 'An English tragedy is impossible', George records him saying. 'What price Shakespeare?' you can almost George ask. In the same entry, George muses on his own 'weakness' when it comes to standing up for himself when dealing with others - always letting others' wishes outflank his own. He is still doing the washing up, and waiting outside shops when Plitt is buying cheap tat - he writes: 'I never dare say what I think, for fear of offending him, or causing a misunderstanding. And this has so often been the case my whole life. Therefore, it is that I am never at peace save when alone.' This is a contributory cause for so much of the bother George experiences in life - and it's such an English affliction - always reluctant to give offence or complain, or to say truths when white lies seem best. The concept of good manners demands it. But, 'suffering in silence' is a fast track to neurosis and a killing spree with an AK47, as we twenty-first century folks know only too well.

The Louvre was a consolation. He hated this by Alphonse Marie Adolphe de Neuville:

But this gave him 'pleasure';

This, I feel, says more about George and his love of all things Rome rather than his rather predictable taste in Art. Are there enough ladies to go round here? I suspect George is the lonely figure on the far left, much as Morley Roberts described our hero at their first meeting: sat on a table, swinging his legs.

By October 16th, George is back with a sore throat and a cold - his last bout of this sort of thing was September 26th, less than three weeks before. Something is very wrong with George's health - these colds and sore throats could be caused by smoking his infernal pipe, or from being a mouth breather (not everyone breathes through their nose if the nose if damaged or affected by changes such as nasal polyps); it might also indicate a lowered immune system caused by stress; or bacterial infection from, for example, tooth decay or poor oral hygiene. (There is also the possibility of more serious causes, but I will save that for another post.) He tells us it is so bad he has to get up and 'make hot water' - boil a kettle, to you and me. To this he adds ammonia - a commonly-used (what we now call) antibacterial used to clean things - this tended to also apply to its medicinal uses: if people wanted to clean themselves out either end! 

Mr Plitt faints clean away at being asked to do the washing up.

Monsieur Gissing 

Plitt once again annoys by saying he would rather see the New Circus that the Oedipus play George has been to see, and by looking in more second-hand shops. Plitt is definitely ahead of his time - Dadaism and the 'Ready Mades' of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, the collages of Braque and sculpture of Picasso, the works of Joseph Cornell and the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg and Peter Blake, the ephemera collections of Andy Warhol and the re-imaginings of Goya by the Chapman Brothers would have appealed to him. George would poke his own eyes out rather than look at any of that (how very Oedipal) crappola!

George bought a little copy of this to send to Madge for her birthday. Doesn't the lion look like George?
La Cruche Casee by Greuze.

There is an incident with manky jam (can jam go manky?) that sends Plitt to spit in the fireplace and George to reflect on how awful and common he is - Plitt has been relegated to be George;s view of the epitome of the common oik. It is a failure of interpretation rather than a misuse of sociology - did George ever ask Plitt why he collected scraps of ephemeral tat? Did he ever ask him why he holds ideas that so radically differ from his own? Not as a complaint but as a genuine fact-finding mission? To know someone else, we have to have more than our own subjective information - though George is not good at this side of the social sciences. You don't even need empathy to ask a question. 'Live and Let Live' is not George's style, is it?

'Plitt rather more endurable this evening, soothed by a purchase he has made of some execrable chromos. A vulgar nature notably reveals itself in the want of suavity where trifles are concerned'. If only George had thought about this and applied it to himself!

On a more serious note, it does illustrate how tension rises in George (already the world's most uptight individual) when he is up against anything he cannot 'tame'. How picky he becomes, how mean-spirited, unpleasant, judgemental, critical, dismissive, negative, cruel, spiteful - imagine how Marianne aka Nell and Edith had to cope alone with him (at least Gabrielle had Maman). Everything they thought or did or said must have been subjected to the closest scrutiny and judgement by one who thought he was the arbiter of all taste and ideation. And then, subjected to change, of course - modified to conform to George's ideal of what things should be. Did he sit them down and give them feedback? The old 'praise sandwich' - 'I liked the thing you did with the lentils, but you are still a bit short of a good standard with your reading aloud of Tennyson and making effective use of RP, however, on the good side once more, your ironing was spot on'. No wonder they rebelled and no wonder he tried to use force on them - male ego force (I'm not suggesting he hit them but I am sure he considered it as a 'language they would understand' - as a wife beater might justify it. Maybe he did...). One thinks of the misguided, heartless Widdowson (The Odd Women) and to a certain degree, the (vile, to my mind) oleaginous Harvey Rolfe (The Whirlpool) as George's mouthpieces for a force of 'superior' (but only in the physical) strength when affection and charismatic charm would have moved mountains and gotten them all much further.

George continues his solo outings to the Louvre.

This is the Madonna with the Donors by Van Dyke that George writes about in his diary on Thursday October 25th:

'Looked long at the Van Dyke in the last section of the Grande-Galerie; a burgher and his wife kneeling before the Madonna and child; the man kisses the child's hand. The couple have good, honest faces; the husband oldish and world-worn, something pathetic in his look and attitude. The Madonna's face very beautiful, and the kind of beauty that I like; of course not describable.'

The same day, George goes looking for a sculpture Bertz asked him to look up - an allegorical piece about 'the soul combating with the flesh'. George assumes it will be a 'nymph in the hands of a satyr'; this is what it turns out to be:

Not sure what this says about George or Eduard. However, the encounter with it empowers our man and he, for once, stands up for his rights with Mr Plitt. He refuses to add another two weeks to their stay in Paris (as Plitt suggests) - he is aching for Italy. Reading Goethe has been enticing him to get a move on and get there. Plitt annoys him some more and they eventually leave Paris on the way south. George's first trip to Italy - an event of such magnitude he never really got over it - in a good way!


They set sail from Marseilles on October 28th and arrived in Naples on the 30th. They did not share a bunk. Or a bunk up.